


What Kind of Monster Are You?

by honorarycassowary



Category: Carnage (Comics), Venom (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Alternate Universe - Species Swap, F/M, First Meetings, Murder, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:40:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21515431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorarycassowary/pseuds/honorarycassowary
Summary: It's been months since Red last murdered someone. It's been weeks since they subdued the symbiote and locked it in a tube for transport. It's been an hour since the truck transporting the symbiote arrived at the truck stop Red calls her territory. It'll be carnage at first sight.(An AU where Cletus Kasady is an alien symbiote and the Carnage symbiote is a human woman.)
Relationships: Carnage Symbiote/Cletus Kasady
Comments: 12
Kudos: 30





	What Kind of Monster Are You?

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to everyone on the Carnage discord server, without whom this would not have been written.
> 
> Please check out the fanmix I made for this AU: https://cassowarykisses.tumblr.com/post/189215940183/what-kind-of-monster-are-you
> 
> Also, owlapin drew some amazing art of human Red: https://owlapinart.tumblr.com/post/188266073302/finally-finished-a-big-ol-desktop-background

Nothing interesting ever happened on this stretch of Arkansas highway. At least, not unless Red was bored.

It was past eleven at night, and she was rearranging the tacky novelty pocket knives in their plastic display. Put the ones emblazoned with a knock-off skull design in the His bin, the pink camo ones in the Hers, the ones with dinosaurs in the For Kids! section. None of them were worth anything. She’d tested them out, and they had a tendency to break off inside whoever - sorry, _whatever_ \- she was stabbing. 

It was a shame. Red was nostalgic for these shitty gimmicky knives. Nothing beat the feeling of sinking a knife into a body, even if it wasn’t like she didn’t enjoy something different from time to time. (‘Something different’ was the tire iron out back, with its heavy coating of rusted blood she just didn’t want to wash away. Or maybe it was a bottle of vodka and a homemade garrotte, or broken bottle just begging to be shoved into a face. So many options!)

She shivered in anticipation. In an isolated area like this, they’d notice if there were too many murders, so Red built up killing intent until she broke, like orgasm denial. She hated it and she loved it. Right now, she was getting close to her limit.

“Fuck it,” she muttered, and grabbed a knife with a knockoff Punisher skull. She sometimes daydreamed he’d come after her and she’d be the one to break him. Show him his own hypocrisy and get him to blow his brains out. She smiled, sweet and fond. It was one of her favorite fantasies.

She slipped the knife into her boot. This place’s cameras were so irreparably broken they hadn’t caught her killing on-site. Besides, what would shoplifting do, make her more of a felon?

She hopped up and sat on the counter by the till. They may not have given her a chair, but that didn’t mean she was going to stand.

*

She’d barely gotten settled in before she heard someone - finally - pull in. 

Another day, another dumbass. Not that she was complaining.

This dumbass had a fancy truck, though, something with reinforced siding and the loud plainness that marks it as private industry trying to mimic the men in black. Red could tell from the way the driver got out of the truck that he had delusions of paramilitary grandeur. Someone should’ve told him that there was a hell of a difference between an armored car and a tank.

 _He_ was boring, dime-a-dozen. Probably had a Punisher shirt to match her knife. 

The truck, on the other hand, was interesting. She wanted in. If it was money, she could skip town and start over, buy out someone to get her a death ray or something so she could make it in the big leagues. A weapon she could use until she found something stronger.

“Hey there,” she called when he entered the store. He frowned at seeing her seated on the counter and turned to head for their beer case. Drinking and driving. Naughty.

It wouldn’t do to have him ignore her. 

"Hey handsome," she yelled. "Budweiser's on me."

“This some sort of scam?”

“Nah, just pissed at the boss.” Red grinned. “Too much free time on my hands. The cameras broke a week ago and they won’t fix them. Figured I’d make that their problem.”

The man laughed. And just like that, he was her mark.

He grabbed a twelve-pack and headed to the counter. He was kinda good-looking. About average height, brown hair just long enough to show a bit of wave. 

Her mark pointed at her name tag. “Why do they call you Red?”

Red pressed a hand to her bottle-blonde curls. “I always have red nails.” Her nails were painted red and her pose showed them off, but she was thinking of how often she’d had to scrub blood out from under them. Not that that had been how she’d gotten the nickname, either.

“Mind if I light up?”

“Go for it,” she said, shrugging. “Smoke detector’s broken too.”

“Do the gas pumps work?”

Light a cigarette out there and find out, she thought.

She said, “Yeah. Only thing they care about.”

He nodded grimly. These macho man types were so easy to win over with stories of the vague _they_ keeping her down. As if. The only thing keeping her down was her inability to get up after being shot.

Her mark took a long drag on the cigarette in blatant defiance of the NO SMOKING sign that hung behind Red, then offered it to her. She held it in her fingers, ineptly seductive like trailer trash trying to play Greta Garbo.

“What’ve you got in the truck?”

Her mark smirked. “Important stuff,” he said. “So important I can’t tell you any more.”

She rolled her eyes. “I hear that one a lot. It always turns out to be tomatoes or diapers or some shit.”

“No, this is the real deal.”

“Impressive,” Red said. She passed him the cigarette back.

“What’s your last name?” he asked. 

Red noted the subject change. He was arrogant enough to get buy her obvious lot lizard act, but not arrogant enough to say anything. 

“Kasady,” she said. “Like Butch Cassidy. I’m just looking for my Sundance Kid.” She winked at him, a cartoonish exaggeration of flirting.

Her mark chuckled. She kept smiling. “I should get that engraved on here. Something to remember you by.” He tapped his lighter against the counter meaningfully.

Yeah, it’d be real nice to have a trophy to remember this idiot by when he was in a shallow grave out by the highway. Red giggled. “You’d do that?” 

“Sure.”

“Oh my god,” Red said. “I mean, oh my gosh.” She thought that was laying the naif act on a little too thick, but her mark just smiled. “Let me get a pen.” She made a show of fumbling behind the counter for extra receipt paper and a pen, and slipped her spiked brass knuckles into the back pocket of her jeans while she was at it. She scrawled K-A-S-A-D-Y on the paper and slipped it over to the mark.

He frowned. “Hey, that’s not how Butch Cassidy spelled his name.”

Red forced her face into the most brain-dead approximation of cute confusion she could manage. Exactly what this type of guy wanted to see.

He chuckled again. God, he had a stabbable larynx.

Red giggled back, and felt the knife in her boot rub against her calf.

*

Turned out, the man was nice to look at, but he didn't have any stamina. Red reclined the passenger seat and looked at his dead body. When she'd stabbed him in the throat, he'd started to choke on his own blood and his eyes had nearly bulged out of his skull. Hilarious. She should've sent it in to America's Funniest Home Videos, if they'd had any sense of humor at all. Last time she tried that, there'd been FBI agents sniffing around town. It took years for that business to clear up. But she'd cut the artery too deep, and he'd gagged to death in less than a minute.

"Shoulda taken a Viagra for that blood flow," she said.

She'd gotten pretty comfy in the chair, when a crash came from the back of the truck.

Watching her mark bleed out had taken the edge off of her hunger, enough that she’d almost forgotten her fantasy of breaking into the truck and running off to become a spree killer. 

Damn, she thought. Were there people back there? It'd be her lucky night - she might get a chance for round two.

The guy kept the keys to the back shoved in his jeans pocket. It was a pain to flip his dumpy ass over, but she managed. Afterwards, she took a few minutes to saw through his trachea and neck muscles, so she could flip the head up and down. She'd wanted to impale his head on the gear stick, make him feel what it was like to deepthroat something, but the esophagus was too narrow. After a few tries at jamming it up his throat, Red gave up and forced his mouth onto it instead. It looked stupider, which she considered a win.

Red hopped out of the cab and headed around back. As she opened the doors, Red squinted. It was pitch black back there, and there couldn't be any people. They'd be blobs in the darkness. The trailer, it seemed, was entirely empty, except for a toppled box in the middle she couldn't see over. 

Damn her father's short genes, she thought. 

Red had never been one to hesitate, so she placed her hands on the floor and pushed herself up into the truck. Almost immediately, she realized her mistake, as her knee landed on a shard of glass. 

"FUCK," Red swore. Those had been her sexiest low-rises, too. She'd have to drive in to the city to replace them. Goddammit. 

She shifted back onto her ass, careful of the other shards, to get a better look at the cut. Her eyes were having trouble adjusting to the darkness. Something in it was odd.

She swore again, this time under her breath, always reluctantly conscious of what would happen if another trucker pulled in and saw her. If she had her way, she'd rip the second guy to shreds and feed him the first guy's spine, but she was only human. Unfortunately.

Instead she just squinted even harder than before. She could've gone back in to get a flashlight, but that'd be giving up, and Red didn't move any way but forward. Everyone else could get out of her way, even if was the goddamn worthless night making her realize she had weak human eyes. If nature had had any sense, she'd have shiny eyes, reflecting back red like an alligator.

Red shook her head to get her curls out of her face, and her eye was caught by a spot of something dark on the floor. It was her blood, obviously. A small pool of it from where she'd cut her knee. But something about it entranced her, like her blood didn't normally do. Her blood was just DNA evidence to be cleaned up, or to be strategically spread so it looked like she'd fought back in self-defense, not a premeditated attack. It was other people's blood she reveled in.

She reached out and ran her finger through the smear. It was surprisingly cool, but it was a hot night, and the trucker she'd just killed hadn't had the AC on in the cab. No wonder she was running hot. Something in her wanted more than to just touch it, though. Red never had seen the value of impulse control, so she popped her finger in her mouth.

She realized instantly that whatever it was, it wasn't her blood. 

It pulsed through her like her blood, though. Like her life force. It slid across her tongue and through a hundred microscopic cuts in her mouth - through the spot on her cheek she'd bitten last week, from the rough patch on her hard palate where she'd sucked on an Atomic Fireball so hard she'd worn it ragged.

She'd watched that dumbass trucker with his sneer and poorly hidden public hard-on drown in his own blood, saliva, and mucus. This time, she was the one choking. 

It could've been ironic, but fuck that Alanis Morisette bullshit. Red wasn't going to die choking on her own blood. She was going to burn up, or be cut in half, or get shot in the head by the men in black. She grabbed her knife from her belt and swung it wildly. She spotted another drop of blood on the floor and fell on it, stabbing at the metal floor repeatedly. The knife just clattered and skidded off, scraping against the hand Red was using to brace herself. She snarled at the blood on the floor, daring it to come closer.

It rushed towards her hand like a film of splattering blood played in reverse, a corpse putting itself back together. It slid inside her skin through the open cut. Red stabbed at the air a few times to make sure this blood thing knew exactly how she felt, then grabbed her wounded hand and began to gnaw on it. She didn't know why, but Red rolled with her impulses, and it felt like the right thing to do. 

As her tongue made contact with the cut, the taste of blood cut off, and she could feel the wound close up. Her mouth began to heal as well, sore patches on her gum line whose ache she'd gotten used to becoming whole. She pulled her hand back and glared at it. The last this blood creature could do was give her something to fight. Red didn't need anyone's shitty mercy. That was for idiot punks like her dear old dad.

As she panted in the dark truck, Red felt something. A presence, like someone beside her. Red stared out the open back of the truck. She had sort of a sixth sense for witnesses, and if it had failed now, she was going to be pissed. Everyone knew the only proper way for a serial killer to get caught was by a loved one as they hung up a curtain of human skin in their secret workshop out back. Then you got to flip a coin as to whether the loved one would be skinned or the police would burst in a second later. 

It felt like eyes behind her, a little to the left. Red raked her hands through the air where it felt the watcher should be. She'd had her nails done just a few days before, so they were sharp and lacquered. People tended to think they were impractical right until Red sank them into their eyeballs.

She'd sunk her nails into people's eyeballs. She'd sunk her knife into that trucker's throat. She'd felt the fleshy thunk of his esophagus as it failed to fit over the gearshift. She'd felt his cooling tongue against the back of her hands as she forced his dead mouth open, and she'd wanted to laugh because he could never sneer again. 

**_Hoo-ha!_ ** a voice exclaimed. It reverberated through her brain like a concussion.

Red hissed. It felt like someone had rewound and played her memories like a VHS. 

**_You're a regular old nutjob. Good thing I am too!_ ** the voice continued. It laughed like someone banging against a washboard. There was more than laughter there, though. Red could feel its delight. It ran mental tendrils through the memory of the trucker's murder like a lover running hands through her hair. **_This? This is artistry._ **

Red gripped the sides of her head like it'd help her focus. "Who are you?" she asked.

The thing shrugged inside her brain. It supplied some images: an alien planet where the streets were slick with green blood and strange black slime devoured the remnants of the bodies; a juvenile detention center with a sign reading 'ST. ESTES' and a courtyard strewn with corpses; a ridiculous patriotic mural painted over with blood. **_I'm just a guy out to have a good time, baby._ **

A good time? This was a whole different league of murder. Red had never thought she'd see anything as beautiful as those images in her whole life. She remembered a stupid joke she'd heard once, about a man who always picked up hitchhikers because really, what were the chance of two serial killers meeting? and she grinned. "Sounds like my kind of fun."

As she spoke, her blood slipped out her pores and wound itself around her nails until they were true claws.

 **_I'm a craftsman,_ ** it (he?) said. **_My friends didn't appreciate my vision, so I hitched a ride here. Horror stories that take place on backwater, isolated planets where nobody can call the Agents or the Accusers are such a cliche, but they ain't popular for no reason._ **

"I know the feeling," Red said. "The classics are classics. The pompous idiots think that living a cliche makes them untouchable. They have no idea how much they can bleed." The blood continued to climb up Red's arms.

 **_No idea,_ ** the voice agreed. A tendril of blood reached up and stroked Red's cheek. **_You move like you were born on a different planet. You were born to kill._ **

Red laughed. "Seems like we're two peas in a pod."

The voice shivered with anticipation as it spoke. **_We could do so much together. We could go back out right now and string that corpse up by his intestines. He won't have gotten stiff yet._ **

"Think bigger," Red said. "We could drive this truck into town. They'll all be asleep. We can see how many houses we get through before the screams start to wake everyone else up."

The blood enveloped Red's face, cradling her cheeks like she'd cradled that old trucker's, moments before she'd slit his throat. **_You're my kind of host, Red._ ** the voice said. **_Carnage incarnate._ **

"You're flattering me," she said, and flexed her new claws. They came to wicked points, and inside her sequined boots she could feel similar claws on her feet. Even her hair was a mass of writhing tendrils to put Medusa to shame.

**_Like them? I thought you would._ **

“Got anything a little bigger?” Red asked. She pictured the fireaxe in the back room. She'd always wanted to use it for a murder, but she'd been saving it for a special occasion. 

Her arm twisted. She could feel her bones break through the skin painlessly, surrounded by a thick curtain of biomass and her own distorted flesh. Before long, her entire left arm below the elbow was a double-headed axe. 

Red didn’t have weapons anymore. She was a weapon.

She grinned. Her face melted away into fangs as she smiled, and folded into lips when she schooled her face.

“Oh, baby,” she breathed. “I’ve got so many more ideas like that for us to try.” She hopped out of the trailer and headed towards the cab, twirling the keys around one claw.

**_Tell me more._ **


End file.
